The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Sunday, March 15, 2015

The Primal Wound and the Trojan Horse in Ontario

Some time ago, I wrote a post about how
misinformation sneaks into public thinking when braided together with accurate
information (http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2014/12/mistaken-attachment-beliefs-persuasion.html).
I referred to the practice of combining information with misinformation as a
Trojan Horse. (I tried to work out another metaphor involving Odysseus and his men
escaping from the cave by hiding under the sheep, but that didn’t seem to be
what was needed-- besides, I’ve always
thought those must have been awfully large sheep. Or small men.)

Jessica Pegis recently alerted me to an egregious
Trojan Horse being parked outside Canadian castle walls at http://www.adoptontario.ca/childhood-trauma.
This is a site run by AdoptionOntario, an organization that is partially funded
by the provincial government. It presents a rather thoroughly braided group of
statements, and I think it would be valuable to disambiguate them.

Let’s look at the accurate information that is given
there. The site points out that very young children may be affected by
traumatic events, and that they are sensitive to events that threaten their
caregivers as well as threats to themselves alone. Domestic violence and
natural disasters can create situations that are traumatic for young children,
as can painful or frightening medical procedures or abrupt separation from
familiar people. Some traumatic events occur once and never again, but the site notes that it’s common for
children who experience a traumatic event actually to have more than one associated traumatic experience. (A natural disaster
like an earthquake, for example, is frightening and even painful in itself, but
may be accompanied by the sight of injured or dead people and the confusion and
distress of the adults the child usually can trust to provide safety. ) But repeated traumatic events, like sexual
abuse, are even more likely to have ill effects on children’s emotional and
cognitive lives than single events are.

So far, so good. There’s nothing wrong with what
adoptontario.ca has said up to this point. But on closer inspection, here’s
what we find:

“Trauma for an adoptee begins at the moment of
separation from a birthmother. Whether adopted from birth or later in life, all
adopted children have experienced some degree of trauma. Until recently, the
full impact of trauma on adopted children has not been fully understood. Since
infants do not see themselves as a separate entity, it is believed they see
themselves as a part of the person they physically attached and bonded to for
40 weeks. When separated, infants may naturally feel they have lost part of
themselves. When an adoptee is separated from a birthmother, extensive trauma
is experienced. The trauma will not be remembered, but it will stay in the
subconscious as it was lived. Any event in infancy can and will stay with an
individual through life.”

Later, the site states:

“Theoretically, adopted children have experienced
being unwanted before they are born. In addition, they may have experienced the
loss of the mutual and deeply satisfying
mother-infant bond. This experience can affect them in more than one
way, including

·Grieving the loss of their birthmother

·Being emotionally vulnerable

·Anger

·Shutting people out, depression, or
overcompensation” (this list is in addition to other claimed results of
childhood trauma)”

With this material, we see the Trojan Horse at work.
Under cover of accurate information, the web site has now brought in some
completely inaccurate statements-- and
even worse, a group of statements that can lead adoptive families to
misinterpret normal behavior, and adopted individuals to believe that they are
doomed to emotional disturbance. A quick glance at the accurate information
could easily lead readers to believe that everything on the site was of equal
value.

What’s wrong here? What has entered inside the
Trojan Horse supplied by the correct information?

The essential point to consider is that there is no
evidence that unborn infants do form emotional attachments to their mothers, or
that they recognize their mothers at birth. The possibility that attachment
could have started 40 weeks before birth
is ludicrous-- first of all, because 40
weeks before birth is the average date of the first day of the mother’s last
menstrual period before pregnancy, not the date of conception! It would be even
more absurd than the rest of this stuff to assume that an ovum, ripening but
unshed, and certainly unfertilized, has already begun to develop an emotional
bond to a woman who may not even have intercourse during the time window that
would allow for fertilization. If this were true, how tragic to think of all
those unfertilized but attached ova being swept away from Mommy in the course
of her next period—enough grief each month to overwhelm the cosmic plan,
especially when Mom (callous bitch that she is) says to somebody, Thank
goodness, I got my period, I was getting worried.

Emotional attachment of infants to familiar
caregivers takes place over months of social interactions and begins to show up
behaviorally at about 7 or 8 months of age in most babies, when fear of
strangers and of separation first emerges. Younger babies welcome social
interaction with strangers and show little distress when separated from
familiar people. If some prenatal form of attachment has occurred, it certainly
does not show up in infant behavior or mood, or in any other measurable way.

Okay, let’s say that the 40 weeks is just a clerical
error. Let’s place the time at 38 weeks before birth. The ovum gets fertilized.
Does it have a nervous system to remember or learn things with? No; but this
doesn’t matter to those who believe (as seems to be a possibility for someone
at adoptontario.ca) that it’s “cellular memory” that’s at work, a kind of
memory in each cell that represents events in the deepest way and survives
mitosis each time, so that all cells have the memory of whatever happened to
that ovum. This belief is completely contrary to everything we know about
learning and memory. If it’s true, all scientifically-based statements about
this or false. I’m not saying there could not be such a new paradigm-- but really, what are the chances?

What about the idea that everything experienced in
infancy is preserved “as it was lived” in the “subconscious”? Study after study
of memory tells us that memory does not preserve material “as it was lived”. On
the contrary, when memory works (which is not always), it maintains not a
photograph but the gist of an event, which the rememberer then reconstructs to
create a belief about what “must” have happened. The adoptontario.ca author
seems to be embroiled in what has been called the “trauma-memory war”—the claim
that early traumatic experiences cannot be consciously remembered, but are
nevertheless directing matters from behind the cognitive scenes.

Basically, without saying so (and this is another
sign of a Trojan Horse), adoptontario.ca has stated a belief in the claims of
the California marriage and family therapist Nancy Verrier that every adopted
individual has experienced, and continues to suffer from, a Primal Wound, from
which he or she can recover only with difficulty or not at all. This belief
system can be traced to the “psychohistorian” Lloyd DeMause, who presented a
bizarre description of what unborn babies must really be experiencing. (DeMause
was able to promulgate this for quite a while because he was quite well off and
started his own journal with papers about his claims.) DeMause, and Verrier too,
received much support from the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology
and Health (APPPAH), whose members would be in complete agreement with
adoptontario.ca.

Canadians, your provincial money is going to support
this unfounded material, and to contribute to beliefs that are potentially
harmful to adopted people, adoptive families, and birth parents who consented
to adoption! How about speaking up?

Whew! When those cells divided, it must have been such a trauma for both of you! Life is tough, isn't it? But maybe you can become famous for describing Twin Trauma Disorder, and if you ever commit a crime you can mount a traumatic separation defense.

Hey, how about the fact that some of your cells went to make the placenta, and then after you were born that was just thrown in the incinerator?

Never mind, PW thinking doesn't care about the facts of embryonic development.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.